"I don't understand."
"Understand this: I'm gonna be out of this cage before the year's over. I'm gonna be sitting in my chair, not Frank. But it's gonna take time. I shelled out two hundred grand and then some to a big shot in Washington who's gonna open these gates up wide, right from D.C. And I got five of the biggest attorneys in the land getting me ready for being sprung. But it'll take time, and in the meantime, I don't want Frank and the rest of them bums flushing my empire down the shithole."
"What makes you think they're doing that?"
He shook his head, sadly; puffed the pool-cue cigar. "I thought Frank was smarter than this. No kiddin', I did. I thought he learned from my mistakes; I thought he learned my lessons. You can't stir up the heat. That's the one mistake I made, and I learned to correct it, but too late, I guess, or otherwise I wouldn't be sitting in here. I stirred up the heat. I put too many bodies on the front page. People want candy on Valentine's Day, not headlines."
I said nothing.
"I tried to play peacemaker, you know. All along. I done that. Just last year, 'bout this time, when I was waiting in the Cook County Jail, they brought that crazy bastard Dutch Schultz and Charlie Luciano in to see me. They been feuding. It was Schultz's fault, horning in on Charlie's territory. The dumb bastard Schultz wouldn't listen, and I didn't end up gettin' nowhere, but the point is I tried, my natural bent's to be a peacemaker. Only how do you make peace with Dutch Schultz? If I'd had him outside, I'd've shoved a gun in his guts."
Capone's cigar, in one pudgy hand now, had gone out; he lit it again, and I sat patiently waiting to see where I fit in.
"When I heard what Frank's planning, I sent word to him: don't do this, Frank. You'll stir up the heat, Frank. You can find a better way, Frank. And you know what he says, what the lawyer says he says? He says, you're inside, Al, and I'm out, and, all due respect, I gotta trust my judgment. I'm outside, he says, and I'm handling things. That's what he says."
There was a great sadness, greater frustration, in his face.
Then he smiled, a small, private smile.
"You know what Frank's planning?" he asked innocently.
"No."
"Guess."
•I- I can't."
"Go on. Guess."
"Gang war? He hit Newberry the other day."
Capone grinned, said, "And about time! That bum jumped from side to side whenever the wind blew his way. He shoulda got his February fourteenth '29. No, you can kill somebody, from time to time, if you don't do it on no big scale, and you don't make a habit of it. But there's some people you just can't hit."
"Like who?"
"Like the mayor of a big city."
"What?"
"Cermak. Frank's gonna hit Cermak."
He leaned back and puffed his cigar and smiled at me, quietly, amused by the look on my face no doubt.
"You're kidding," I said.
"Yeah, I'm kidding. I paid you a grand and brought you down on the Express to tell you my life story."
I thought about it. "I saw Nitti in the hospital." I said. "He hates Cermak, all right. I guess it's possible he'd do something like that… but it seems- "
"Crazy? It's suicide. Heller. Times are hard; the booze business is comin' to a close. And I got to take my business into quieter areas. I made plenty of progress with the unions, for instance. That's the future, Heller. But there ain't gonna be a future, not for my business, if the guy I give it for safekeeping to goes around shooting the mayor of Chicago."
"He's not going to shoot him himself, for Christ's sake- "
"No! He's crazy but he ain't insane. Don't be dumb."
"How's it going to happen?"
"I don't know exactly. That's where you come in."
"Me?"
"I got certain lines of communication; I picked up on some of it. but not all of it. I know where, and sort of when. I even know who the triggerman is."
"So tell."
"Cermak's going to Florida. I wish it was me, not him. Going to Florida, that is, not gettin' hit. He's going to Miami for patronage. Cermak flicked up royal, you know, when he backed Al Smith clear till the last minute, and didn't deliver the important votes to FDR at the convention. He hopped on the bandwagon at the last minute, but he's still shit with the White House, so he's gotta go down there while the president-to-be holds court, and beg for scraps. Kind of a laugh, the king of patronage havin' to be a beggar. Well. Cermak'll be down there a week or so. And sometime during that week, the hit'll go down. Doing the hit outa town, that's Frank's idea of keeping from stirring up the heat. Jesus. Anyway. That's all I know."
"You said you knew the triggerman."
"I know who they plan to use as of today; it could change. We're talkin' next month, and things change. But it's part of why I sent for you. Heller. First, you're a cop; you can handle this. You can tail Cermak. and even if you get seen, so what? You're no hood, just an honest citizen takin' a vacation. And bein' a cop, you can use a gun if you have to. And you'll have a gun permit, don't worry. You'll be down there as a licensed private cop with a gun permit. I got connections in Miami that'll see to that."
"There are plenty of people just as capable as me, Al. So why me?"
"The triggerman's name don't matter. But let me put it this way he's a blond boy. About twenty-eight, thirty. And you seen him before." He grinned at me. "Get it?"
I got it.
Because suddenly I understood what favor it was I'd done for him once; what work I'd done that I didn't know was for him.
In the summer of 1930, Alfred "Jake" Lingle walked down the steps into the tunnel running under Michigan Avenue to Illinois Central Station, to catch the one-thirty racetrack special to Washington Park. As he walked along within the tunnel, reading a racing form, smoking a cigar, wearing a jauntily cocked straw hat, a jauntily cocked.38 was placed just over the back of his collar and a bullet went up through his brain, and he fell dead, on his racing form, cigar still burning.
His slayer, who also wore a straw hat as well as a medium-gray suit, was blond, about five ten, weighed perhaps 160 pounds, and seemed to be in his late twenties. He had held the gun in his left, gloved hand, and dropped the snubnose to the cement, just as Lingle was dropping. And the blond gunman ran. He ran through the startled crowd, pushing his way back to the stairs Lingle had come down, ran back up to Michigan Avenue, crossing it, running west onto Randolph Street, where a traffic cop stationed at Randolph and Michigan, in response to someone's cry of "Get that man," took pursuit. The cop got within arm's reach of him, getting a good look at the blond, but stumbling. and then the gunman angled down an alley and, presumably, followed the maze of alleys back into the Wabash crowds, where he was lost.
And so Jake Lingle, reporter, was dead. And Chicago, particularly his employer Col. Robert R. McCormick (who had never met this particular employee- he had four thousand), was outraged. It was obvious that this sixty-five-dollar-a-week police reporter had "got the goods" on gangland, that he "knew too much" and so had been struck down, martyrlike. The Colonel in Tribune Tower offered a a twenty-five thousand dollar reward for information leading to the murderer's conviction; other papers and civic groups kicked in, bringing the tally to over fifty thousand dollars. The fallen hero, this "first-line solider" in the war on crime, would be avenged.
Then, to Chicago's embarrassment (and Colonel McCormick's), Lingle turned out to be. well… he turned out to be Jake Lingle; sixty-five-dollar-a-week legman with the Trib whose yearly income was easily over sixty thousand dollars; who was known in gangland circles as the "unofficial chief of police" because of the clout he could wield, for a price, if you wanted a speak or a brothel or what-have-you sanctioned by the powers-that-be; whose Lincoln car was chauffeured; who owned a summer home on the Michigan lakeshore, and another in Florida; who lived in a suite at the Stevens Hotel, when in Chicago; who played the stock market and the races with equal abandon; whose closest friend was the commissioner of police, next to Al Capone, of course, who gave him the diamond-studded belt buckle he wore at the time of his murder.